


A Memory Like a Snapshot

by MemeKonVLD (MemeKonYA)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Angst, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, First Kiss, Fluff, Friendship, Getting Together, Happy Ending, Humor, Hurt Lance (Voltron), M/M, Misunderstandings, POV Lance (Voltron), Pidge | Katie Holt Being a Little Shit, Pining, Self-Indulgent, Temporary Amnesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-15
Updated: 2017-07-15
Packaged: 2018-12-02 11:07:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11508150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MemeKonYA/pseuds/MemeKonVLD
Summary: Pidge is still close —closer than is entirely comfortable if he has to be honest— giving him an evaluating glance. Lance doesn’t really know where to look, other than up her nose— but that grows old pretty fast. So he looks at himself in the reflection of her glasses. And squints.He touches his own face for the first time since waking up— and feels the roughness of his chin.“I have stubble,” he says, and the words are as alarmed as they can be even though they still sound slightly slurred, slightly off.Pidge blinks a couple of times at him, and finally retracts into a more comfortable distance.“Well, yeah,” she says. “You are like, what? 22? 23 in a couple of months?”“I’m feeling— I’m feeling a little queasy,” he says then, with bright spots of color dancing in front of his eyes as he thinks22.Suddenly, a bucket gets shoved against his face. He takes hold of it with clammy fingers and he leans on his side so he can... use it.Thoroughly.“I’m having Garrison flashbacks,” he hears Pidge say.(Or: Lance is stung by an alien bug, loses his memories temporarily and makesassumptionsabout his and Keith's relationship. Also, Pidge cheats at Uno.)





	A Memory Like a Snapshot

**Author's Note:**

> This is unbeta'ed, self-indulgent, and written in celebration of my favorite boy's upcoming birthday.

The first thing that registers upon opening his eyes is _light_ , so much light, so bright, hurting his retinas. The next one is the figure standing next to him. A figure he knows as well as he knows his own— or, a figure he should know as well as he knows his own. 

He frowns.

“Hunk? When did you get so— so _tall_?” He asks, blinking in Hunk’s direction, seeing everything a little blurry, a little lopsided. After a couple of seconds during the which he strains himself trying to look Hunk up and down from his disadvantageous position lying down, he adds, “And so handsome?”

“Oh boy,” Hunk laughs at him, and Lance has to give him a smile in return because he can’t not. Hunk’s joy has always been particularly infectious to him, even now when he has no idea what’s going on or where he is, or what is happening. 

“What’s going—” He stops, the words sound weird, like he’s talking around balls of cotton lodged in his mouth. He tries again, slower this time, words carefully sounded out, “What’s going on?” 

“Sedatives,” Hunk tells him, nodding along with the word, “a lot of sedatives. Of the Altean variety.”

Lance nods along. That sounds very reasonable. There’s just this thing that— 

“What’s an Altean?”

Hunk frowns at him then.

“Uuuuh? Altean? You know? Like princess Allura? And Coran? From planet Altea?” He explains, making ample hand gestures at him. 

“What’s a— a Cora? A Coran?”

Hunk just looks at him for a couple of seconds after that, an indescribable look in his face. Lance takes the time to look at his surroundings, noticing the fact that he has no idea where he is at all. 

For some reason, he raises his own hand to his face and— wow. He turns it this way and that, taking in the size of it, the length of his fingers, the way he can’t really tell where he’d burnt himself with boiling oil when he was making lunch for his little siblings— that was— that was a couple of days ago, right? Maybe a week? Two? He shouldn’t be healed yet, even though it was just a spot no bigger than a coin. He shouldn’t look as good as new, right? That’s not how burns worked, right?

“Uh, Lance?” Hunk puts one of his hands on top of Lance’s and Lance stares at how much bigger it looks in comparison, even though Lance’s hand is— well, definitely bigger than he remembers it being. “Buddy?”

There’s a quiet, soothing quality in Hunk’s voice— it’s the kind of tone he uses when Lance’s little sister is crying. The one that’s caring and worried— and more than a little awkward, too, since for all he’s a caring and giving individual, Hunk is still an only child. He’s not all that used to dealing with teary, snotty kids; he’d especially not been used to dealing with ones like Lance’s siblings at the beginning, who as cute as they appeared to be— 

“Lance, hey,” Hunk interrupts his train of thinking, sounding the same way— oh so careful, even as he tries to smile at him. “What’s— um, what’s the last thing you remember?”

Lance blinks a couple of times in Hunk’s direction, catching the little glimpses of inner turmoil in Hunk, for all he’s trying to appear cool as a cucumber. Lance can read him. Even if Hunk was better at hiding what he thinks than he is (—he’s too honest to be any good at it, really), Lance would probably still be able to read him like an open book. 

He closes his eyes then, and hums. Trying to remember _hurts_. Or— not exactly pain. A phantom ache, then? No, not really. It’s just— something. Something that niggles and bothers him when he tries to think back, to poke around his memories and find useful information.

“We were—” He stops there, trying to think the words up before he blurts them out and they come out sounding weird and distorted, like he thinks they will with him feeling so— so weird. “We were writing our applications? For the Garrison? I think? Or maybe we’d sent them? I can’t— I can’t remember that clearly.”

Hunk lets a huge, noisy burst of air out, and when Lance opens up his eyes again and looks at him all pretenses of being calm and collected are gone, gone with the wind. He looks exactly like he’d looked the first time they’d gone to an amusement park together and been about to ride a roller coaster for the first time after standing in line for something like twenty minutes. A little green around the edges, shifty.

“I’m, uh—” Lance sees him steeling himself, taking a huge breath and giving himself a pep talk under his breath. “I’m gonna get Coran. Or Allura. Or Pidge. Or all of them. Just— you wait here, okay? Don’t— uh, don’t move?”

Lance nods, though he doesn’t really know where he could go, or if he could even go anywhere at all.

He attempts to move his legs then, trying to lift one up into the air.

Up into the air it goes, and he has to look up and up at the length of it.

Huh.

 

Coran, it turns out, is not a what, but a who.

And so is Allura. 

And Pidge.

Pidge, who Lance zeroes in on when they all walk in.

Lance frowns.

“Matt Holt?” He asks, “I thought you were— taller? Or at least you seemed like it, in the news.”

Pidge— Matt? goes still at that, eyes big as platters, hands frozen where they were about to reach out to something next to Lance’s— bed? Cot? Lance lost track of time a little after Hunk left, and kinda fell into a trance looking at the high ceiling, taking in the lines of it— so different from any other building he’s ever been in, didn’t even take it upon himself to check what exactly he’s lying on. He checks then, supporting himself on an elbow for a couple of seconds as he looks around. Bed, then. One of many. All but his own empty. He gets a little nauseous then, and lies back down.

“—Katie.” 

He looks back at Pidge, catches their mouth closing after the last word and feels a little embarrassed at having spaced out on them, especially when he sees the look on their face.

“Sorry, I didn’t—”

“I’m Matt’s sister. Katie.” She repeats herself then, and the words carry much more meaning than that, make Lance feel like he— like he should be able to do something about that— like he should be helping in some way. Something in the way she looks makes Lance’s instincts go a little wild, remind him a little of his siblings, but there’s also— there’s also something else. 

“Sorry.” He repeats, not really knowing what else to say, or what he did wrong other than getting these two siblings mixed up.

Allura clears her throat then, and Lance looks at her. And almost swallows his tongue. 

Allura is— incredibly gorgeous, with her dark skin and big eyes and soft-looking hair. And Lance feels his cheeks heating up as she walks forward, a pensive look on her face. 

“Hunk says you appear to have lost some of your memories.” she says, a thick accent in her voice that Lance thinks might be— British? But not really. 

“Uh,” he replies, brilliantly, his tongue thicker than it was before. He swallows some spit, and tries again, “Uh, I— I think I did? I don’t— I don’t know where we are or who you are or— or when I got this— this _long_.” He ends, feeling a little ridiculous as he points at the extension of his own body. “Also, moving my head makes me want to hu— uh, throw up.”

Allura gives him a considering look, and then looks to her side, where this Coran person is fiddling with a machine that’s attached to him, now that he pays attention to it. There’s a— a sort of display on it that is unlike anything Lance has seen outside of fiction, and characters that Lance can’t even begin to decipher. The Coran guy hums and then turns to Allura.

“Nothing seems to be out of the ordinary. His vitals all look fine.” He says, and twirls his orange mustache a couple of times as he touches a couple of spots on the display and follows long strings of characters. “Maybe it’s a side effect? I’ve read on our archives on human medicine that some humans can show— interesting side effects to strong sedatives. Including temporary disorientation and amnesia.”

“What happened to me?” He asks, a little nervous. He looks for Hunk, and notices that he’s not in the room. “Where is Hunk?”

“He’s establishing contact with Keith, who’s on a mission,” Allura supplies, looking deep in thought. “Perhaps it was the Ax’etian venom?”

Coran hums at that, and continues fiddling with the display, narrowing his eyes.

“You were stung by a giant alien bug,” Pidge tells him then, walking closer to him then, the quiet distress gone from her face, and a smirk lifting one corner of her mouth. Now that she’s closer Lance can tell the differences between her and what he remembers of Matt from those snippets he caught of him in the news. “In the ass. Literally.”

“Ouch,” he says.

“Yeah,” Pidge agrees with a couple of nods, and gets a dangerous glint in her eyes as she leans over him, eyes magnified by her glasses and way too big and excited. “It was really gross. And sorta terrifying. You got pumped with some kind of alien bug poison and you got all puffed up like a balloon. And you kept babbling about weird stuff. And making little hurt noises— that part was kinda sad.” 

Lance tries to picture it and— yeah, it does look really sad, even in his mind.

Pidge is still close —closer than is entirely comfortable if he has to be honest— giving him an evaluating glance. Lance doesn’t really know where to look, other than up her nose— but that grows old pretty fast. So he looks at himself in the reflection of her glasses. And squints.

He touches his own face for the first time since waking up— and feels the roughness of his chin.

“I have stubble,” he says, and the words are as alarmed as they can be even though they still sound slightly slurred, slightly off.

Pidge blinks a couple of times at him, and finally retracts into a more comfortable distance. 

“Well, yeah,” she says. “You are like, what? 22? 23 in a couple of months?”

“I’m feeling— I’m feeling a little queasy,” he says then, with bright spots of color dancing in front of his eyes as he thinks _22_.

Suddenly, a bucket gets shoved against his face. He takes hold of it with clammy fingers and he leans on his side so he can... use it. Thoroughly.

“I’m having Garrison flashbacks,” he hears Pidge say.

“Ughhh,” is Lance’s inspired reply, before he’s emptying what’s left of his stomach’s contents into the bucket, gasping for air when he’s done.

He feels a cold, soft touch at his neck and when he looks up from his bucket he can see Allura looking down at him, her eyebrows furrowed in concern.

“Are you okay, Lance?”

“Peachy,” he answers, and attempts a flirty grin in her direction, although it feels lackluster even to him.

Allura rolls her eyes fondly.

“We found some more… recent documentation on Ax’etian poison in the files the Olkarian people shared with us. They seem to have evolved in the past ten thousand years. Their poison has adapted to incapacitate their prey and leave them disoriented and vulnerable even after the bloating and the pain are gone. There are several documented cases of temporary retrograde amnesia in victims.”

Lance nods at the information, trying to retain it as best he can, but the words seem to slip out of his grip as soon as they’re out.

Allura smiles at him, softly. 

“What I mean to say is, this is normal. You’ll be fine in a couple of days, once the poison’s completely out of your system. Documented cases vary from one to four days, depending on the subject’s build and physiology. We’ll have to keep you on sedatives until then, however, because the poison produces spikes of intense pain periodically.”

Lance sinks into the bed, then, tension that he hadn’t even known he’d been carrying slipping out of him.

Someone pries the bucket out of his hands, and the last thing he’s aware of is mumbling _thanks_.

 

_“Didn’t you say he was up?”_

He can’t quite place the voice, but there’s palpable worry in it, sending warm tendrils over him, gentle. The knowledge of being cared for, being loved, wanted.

_“Well, yeah, he was. When I was here, a couple of hours ago. I’m not the boss of him, Keith. He’s an independent man, and if he wants to nap… well, I guess that’s what he’s gonna do.”_

Hunk. The voice comes and goes, like he’s drowning and can only ever hear him clearly when his head breaks through the waves. But it’s him. Lance knows him, his pattern of speech and the cadence of his words.

_“He’s— he’s okay, right?”_

There’s a hand holding his. Rough, calloused. Similar in size to his own. Warm.

_“Allura and Coran said so, yes. Apparently this is a normal side effect to being bitten by an ugly alien insect.”_

He feels a weight on his chest, but it doesn’t feel oppressive or dangerous. It feels just as warm as the voice, as the hand.

 _“I’m— I’m glad,”_ the disembodied voice says, and he feels the words vibrate through him, as if they were being whispered into his skin.

_“You got it bad, huh?”_

_"Shut up"_ , he hears, a rumble that he feels on his toes and the tips of his fingers. It’s dishonest and just as warm as his worry, and Lance anchors himself to this presence, lets himself be soothed by it, and falls back into a deep, dreamless sleep.

 

“You’re cheating.”

“Nah, you’re just terrible at this.”

“Nobody’s terrible at _Uno._ ”

“Well, _you_ are. You’re too soft for this dog-eat-dog game.”

“You’re keeping cards up your sleeves!”

“Can you prove it? Oh, and _Uno_.”

“ _What?_ You had three cards!”

“No, I didn’t. I had two, and now I have one. _Uno_.”

Lance groans.

“You two are loud,” he groans out, and feels his bed shift under the weight of two bodies.

He blinks his eyes open and catches a glimpse of yellow and green before he has to close them again against the light.

“Lance!” They both yell and his head throbs at the volume of their voices. 

“Sorry,” Hunk apologizes, and he feels him scooch closer. “We’ve been waiting for you to wake up for hours. Do you— you know...”

“Are your memories back?” Pidge asks as Lance pulls himself up against the bed’s header. He’s less dizzy than before. Things look— realer. Not as though they’ve been put through some sort of filter. Words sound clearer. He can _think_ clearer. 

He looks at Pidge, and closes his eyes. He makes an effort to recall something, _anything_ , about her.

And comes up empty.

“No,” he sighs.

“Oh,” she says, and pushes her glasses up her nose’s bridge. “I figured you wouldn’t, but hope springs eternal right?”

Hunk looks at her.

“Did you get into Coran’s stash of human novels again?”

Pidge shrugs.

“There’s only so much to do in the castleship.”

Hunk nods at that, making an agreeing noise.

It all feels oddly familiar. And he guesses it is. He just— he just can’t remember it becoming that way.

Someone yawns next to him, and that’s when Lance notices that there’s someone sitting next to him, loosely holding his hand.

That someone lifts his head and looks at him. 

And Lance gets pierced through with _something_ , something electric and sharp. 

“Uh, hi there, handsome,” he says, smiling at this person that’s still looking right into his eyes, still holding his hand. His fingers twitch involuntarily, and the guy’s hand tightens around his.

“Lance,” the guy practically sighs out, and his shoulders slump as he gives him a lopsided smile. 

His heart sinks with the the intimacy it all conveys, with the startling realization that this is the owner of that disembodied voice he heard between dreams, that they might be… together. And Lance can’t remember that at all, can’t remember _him_. And it’s not his fault that he got bitten by some alien bug, but as he looks into the dark blue eyes of this guy who looks as though seeing Lance whole and hearty is the one thing he needs to stay happy, it sure feels like.

“ _Guys_ ,” Pidge groans, sounding pained, “it’s way too early for this, okay?”

Lance breaks visual contact with his— his boyfriend? and looks at her. She’s curling her lip in mock disgust as she starts gathering all the cards on top of the bed. As she’s doing that a couple of cards slip out of her sleeve.

“Oops,” she says.

Hunk gapes at her in mock outrage.

“I’m really glad you’re okay,” the guy says then, voice low enough for only the two of them to hear, and when Lance looks back at him he gets sucker punched by the intensity of his gaze.

“Um, uh, yeah. Princess Allura says I’ll be in mint condition in maybe a day or two?”

The guy’s soft smile widens, and Lance gets the whole nine yards of in-love clichés: the butterflies in the pit of his gut, feeling tongue-tied, the heat creeping up his cheeks and down his jaw and his neck. 

_Oh, God._

“What’s your name?” He blurts out then, and immediately bites his lips.

The guy frowns then, and his hand tenses around Lance’s. Lance can’t help but rub his thumb over his knuckles, noticing how rough they are, how one feels like it’s only just healed a split. 

“Keith,” he supplies, a little subdued.

“Keith,” he repeats, the name feeling natural on his lips, as though he’s said it a thousand times. He likes it. He says it again, and when Keith’s breath hitches he feels like he’s won some sort of competition. 

“Okay, I’m done,” Pidge interrupts again. “Wanna play some Uno before your hourly drip knocks you out?”

Keith blushes and lets go of his hand then. Lance wants to whine _no_ and reach back for it, but he also doesn’t want to pressure Keith. Maybe he isn’t into PDA, maybe what they have is new. So he just feels forlorn and nods at Pidge, telling her that she better not cheat on someone who’s bedridden.

(She cheats anyway.)

 

The next time he wakes up, only Keith is left, leaning over him, watching him with an intense gaze that has him all tied up in knots even with dizziness clinging to him. 

“You know watching people sleep is a little creepy, right?” He slurs, blinking slowly a couple of times.

Keith flushes, but doesn’t avert his gaze.

“You talk in your sleep,” Keith says.

“Huh,” he replies, and moves onto his side so he can face Keith without straining his neck. “I haven’t done that in years.”

Keith hums.

“Where are the others?”

“Dinner.”

“Aren’t you gonna have dinner?” He asks, and it comes out more flirtatious than intended, but something in him just acts on its own. Habit, he guesses. 

Keith’s flush spreads.

“I already ate,” he says, words a little stilted. 

“You’re a terrible liar, you know?” He says, and closes his eyes and yawns. “Thanks for staying though.”

“No problem,” Keith murmurs as Lance burrows his face into his pillow. “Partner.”

 

“So,” he tries to calm his heart down and appear chill. Just, chill as a cucumber, “so— we’re in space, right?”

“Yeah,” Hunk says.

 _Yeah_. No biggie.

He nods and lets out a long breath.

“Okay, um— then we— we graduated the Garrison? Are we on a mission? Did we— uh, did we discover alien races?”

“No, no, and kind of? More like they discovered us,” Pidge answers, not even looking up from the gadget she’s tinkering with.

Hunk rolls his eyes, and upon looking at Lance, grimaces.

“Yeah, well, about that...”

“Shiro and— and Matt went missing on an expedition, then an alien ship crash landed near the Garrison and Shiro was in it. We rescued him and then went looking for a giant lion robot that Keith had been stalking. And then when we found it you bonded with it and stuff happened and we ended up in space.

“And now the five of us are the paladins of Voltron, defenders of the universe. The ones standing between the Galra empire and universal domination.”

“Wow,” Lance says, blinking at Pidge with wide eyes.

“That’s the SparkNotes version,” Pidge concludes.

Lance gives himself a couple of seconds to think about this, as bizarre as it seems. When he looks at Keith and Hunk, they both give him little shrugs that he’s certain roughly mean _yeah, that’s about it_.

His brain chooses to fixate on one thing though, one little detail that just— won’t go.

"Wait. When you say Shiro, surely you don't mean—"

"Oh yeah," Hunk smirks. "She does mean Takashi Shirogane in the flesh."

"Oh my God," Lance squeaks out. "Please tell me I haven't—"

"Don't worry. Your childhood crush is still a secret, I think. Well. Kind of. An open one, I guess? But there were no confessions or anything embarrassing like that. Or, you know, anything too embarrassing."

" _Oh my God._ "

"Crush?" Keith interrupts then, a little awkward.

Pidge groans.

"So Lance here," Hunk points at him teasingly, "had this really intense crush on Shiro before we enrolled in the Garrison. He even saved clippings of articles where he appeared or was mentioned. It was cute."

"This is betrayal," Lance says as he covers his face with his hands. "I never poke fun at _your_ crushes."

"You called my girlfrie— my _Shay_ — not that she’s mine, okay? she’s hers and— _anyway_ , you called her a rock." Hunk defends himself.

"I don't even remember who that is, though," He complains, and shoots a sad little look at Hunk through his fingers.

"So you had a— a _crush_ on _Shiro_?" Keith interrupts, and Lance can see pink spots high on his cheeks.

Lance’s heart skips a beat. 

"It was more hero worship than a crush, I guess. He just— he was so impressive, you know? In the recruitment ads. And then when I read up on him— I guess I just wanted to _be_ like him?"

"And you also thought he was really hot," Hunk adds, helpfully.

"And that too," Lance admits.

"Gross," Pidge says, scrunching her nose.

Hunk rolls his eyes at her. 

Keith just keeps looking awkward and flushed. 

“It was a long time ago,” Lance reassures him, reaching out for his hand. 

Keith’s fingers twitch when Lance entwines them with his, but he doesn’t let go. 

Lance’s heart soars. 

Hunk clears his throat, and Lance blushes.

"So... how did we become friends? We are friends, right?" He asks, then, cheeks burning, and voice high enough to feel a sharp stab of pain on his head. He tries not to wince, and feels himself growing hotter.

Pidge rolls her eyes at him.

"Yeah, you nerd." 

She goes quiet after that, thoughtful.

"I guess... I guess you were just— you were just really insistent?"

"Oh, wow." He says and snickers.

"I didn't get into the Garrison to make friends, and I wasn't— I wasn't always the best team mate, because finding out the truth about what had happened to Matt in that expedition was always my number one priority but you— you always stuck up for me regardless. To Iverson and the other instructors. You covered for me and took the fall for stuff I'd done wrong because my head wasn’t exactly in the game. And Hunk just cared about stuff he didn't need to and offered help with my gadgets and always offered to bake me homemade cookies when I was having a hard day. And then one day it dawned on me that I kinda thought of you two as friends, I guess."

"Awww," Hunk coos, entirely honest, "we love you too."

"I take back everything I said. We aren't friends. We’re mortal enemies," Pidge says, flushing as Hunk enfolds her in a one-armed hug. 

"Nope, nuh-uh, you can't take it back. We already know you love us."

"Ugh," Pidge complains, but there's a smile tugging at the corner of her lips and she leans into the embrace for a couple of seconds.

Lance smiles, touched.

He turns to look at Keith, then.

"What about you?"

"What about me?" Keith asks back, a little confused frown on his face.

 _He's incredibly cute_ , Lance thinks, heart beating a little faster again, _I have an incredibly cute boyfriend._

“How did we— ” _get together_ , “how did we become friends?”

“Oh, this one ought to be good,” Hunk says, amidst snickers.

Lance frowns

“What— why?”

Hunk mimes zipping his lips and then puts his hands up, nodding at Keith.

“Uh,” Keith combs through his hair with his free hand, awkwardly. He looks at Pidge and then at Hunk, as if asking for help.

“Oh my God. Hunk, put him out of his misery.”

“Ooookay,” Hunk says, trying to feign annoyance, but his smile can’t be contained. And Lance knows he’s a big gossip, anyway, so it would never have worked. “I can totally kickstart you, man.”

Keith smiles at him, and Hunk smiles back, making himself more comfortable on the foot of Lance’s bed. 

“Okay, official disclaimer: I wasn’t around for this part, so I only know what you told me about it. I can’t attest for, like, 100% veracity of the facts.”

“Hey!” Lance yelps, a hand going to his chest. “I’m always 100% honest.”

Hunk rolls his eyes.

“Okay, so: on the orientation day I’d left you alone for a couple of minutes to go to the bathroom, and apparently that’s when you met Mr. Keith Kogane. _Apparently_ ,” he stresses the word, even with his hands, “he bumped into you and then glared at you quote ‘like you were absolutely beneath him’ unquote, and dusted himself off before walking away.”

“That’s not what happened,” Keith blurts out, an indignant look in his eyes, his eyebrows furrowed. 

“See?” Hunk tells him then.

“I— we bumped into each other,” Keith tells him, and he sounds so earnest about it that Lance has to nod at him to encourage him to go on. Keith doesn’t seem like the naturally sharing type, but he’s also obviously willing to do so, if given time and space, and Lance wants to hear everything he could say, even if he _is_ kind of calling him a liar at the moment. “And you squinted at me. I got nervous and said sorry and left.”

“Oh God, you _ran away_ ,” Pidge says, mirth obvious in her tone, “you _ran away_ from _Lance_ , this is amazing.”

“I think it’s...” Hunk starts, then stops. “Nah, I got nothing.”

“I think it’s cute,” Lance declares then, and he’s very obviously flirting with Keith, but that should be fine, right? It’s what couples do, be disgusting in front of their friends?

“Of course you do,” Pidge deadpans. 

Lance laughs a little at that and when he calms down he sees both Hunk and Keith looking at him. Hunk with narrowed, thoughtful eyes. Keith with wide ones, mouth a little open, the entirety of his face a little red.

Lance can’t resist the impulse of putting one of his hands on Keith’s cheeks, to check if he’s as warm as he looks.

He is.

Keith sucks a breath in and then closes his mouth abruptly.

“And that’s how you met,” Hunk interrupts, pointedly, and Lance lets his hand fall down to his lap. “Then there was that time you had to do a flight simulation together a couple of months into first year, when you were still a cargo pilot,” he adds, and there’s an evil glint in his eyes. “That one became the simulation that shall live in infamy. I think someone uploaded a video to youtube.”

Keith groans.

Lance is intrigued, despite himself.

 

“You did _what_?” 

“How was I supposed to know that wasn’t how you treated a—”

“It’s in the _manual_ ,” Lance screeches at Keith, though he’s truthfully a couple of seconds away from bursting into laughter.

“Well, I hadn’t exactly gone through the whole thing by then, okay? And I was not the one that crashed the—”

“Oh, now you’re trying to blame the amnesiac, that’s just low,” he teases.

Keith fumes.

“Well, you weren’t amnesiac _then_. Although, going by the way you piloted when I had to stitch our dummy engineer, maybe you were, since you didn’t seem to remember _anything_ you were supposed to be doing,” he says, petulantly, and crosses his arms.

Lance feels a playful fire igniting in him.

“Oh yeah? Do you know what people call me?”

Keith rolls his eyes.

“So… I’m getting the impression we didn’t necessarily get along swimmingly in the beginning then,” Lance says then, to the room at large.

“Yeah,” Hunk agrees, “you kinda had this one-sided rivalry thing going on? You wanted to beat Keith so badly, I’d never seen you study so hard. It was kinda sad when we found Shiro and Keith had totally forgotten about you.”

“Hey!” Lance complains, feeling his cheeks warm up. 

Keith looks awkward again.

“I’d dropped out of the Garrison a year or so before that,” Keith defends himself, “I didn’t really remember anyone, sorry.”

Lance blinks a couple of times.

“You dropped out? Weren’t you some kind of star pilot?”

The room goes awkwardly quiet. Lance winces.

Yeah, he probably kinda fucked that one up.

“It wasn’t a good time for me,” Keith replies. He’s looking at his hands, open and palm up on his lap. He’s kind of hunched on his chair. Lance bites back on the impulse to tell him to straighten his back, way too many years of his mom nagging him about good posture making it hard. “I— I was going through a couple of things that I couldn’t understand. And I was doing it alone. I was living on my own, and Shiro was gone, and—”

“I get it,” he interrupts, because Keith looks like the words are killing him as they come out, and he wants to hear everything, but only if Keith feels comfortable telling him.

Keith relaxes a little into his chair, nods.

“Well, that was a mood killer,” Pidge says. 

Keith snorts.

Lance yawns and looks at his side.

Yeah, the drip.

“I’m probably gonna nod off soon,” he tells everyone, “try to not start a Uno war over my unconscious body, okay? I’m too young and pretty to be a casualty of your card games.”

“I can’t make any promises,” Hunk tells him, with a shining smile.

Lance gives him one in return, and lets himself drift off.

 

He wakes up to squeaks.

Lots of squeaks.

He opens an eye and all he sees is blurred color until he can finally focus and see the source of all the squeaking.

Mice.

Four little, colorful mice. 

Curled up together, squeaking in their sleep.

“Oh my God,” he whispers, words blending together a little, “what are they, I want twenty.”

“Those are Allura’s mice,” Keith tells him. “They came along with her when she came in to check up on you an hour or so ago, and then they wanted to stay.” 

Lance pets the tiniest one with one of his fingers, and his heart grows ten sizes when it leans into the touch, obviously pleased with the attention.

“They are so cute,” he gushes, and shoots a helplessly charmed look at Keith.

Keith chuckles. 

“I pictured you’d enjoy their company.”

“I do, oh my God. I wonder if I can knit sweaters this tiny.”

“You tried once,” Keith offers, “it didn’t go that well— something about not having the right needles. You sulked for like an entire week.”

“I don’t sulk,” he says, indignant, as he sits up. “I… am in touch with my emotions. It’s different.”

Keith shrugs. 

That’s when Lance notices the place looks noticeably darker, feels quieter. It’s probably late. Late enough that everyone else has probably gone to bed for the day. Or however it works in space.

“Have you been here, y’know, the whole while?” He asks, narrowing his eyes. Keith has shadows under his eyes. Nothing major— but still noticeable for someone like him.

Keith shrugs again.

“I don’t have anything better to do.”

“Uuuuhhhh, what about sleeping?” He asks, raising an eyebrow.

Keith hums.

“I don’t sleep a lot.”

“Insomnia?”

“Something like that.”

Lance nods. 

They spend a couple of minutes in companionable silence, and then Lance remembers their previous conversation.

“So how did we actually become friends? We’ve covered how we met each other, but we didn’t exactly get past that stage.”

Keith’s expression turns thoughtful.

“There was this time when a Galran commander called Sendak invaded the castleship,” Keith starts.

Lance listens to the whole story, rapt. His heart rate picks up when Keith describes the way he knelt by him, holding him, how it felt like they’d finally gotten across an invisible barrier when Lance told him they were a good team.

He drifts off to the sound of Keith’s voice and the mice’s soft squeaks, wishing that he could remember Keith’s face in that moment, the feeling of his hand around his with their suits on, the reassuring pressure of his hand on his back, easing the feeling of dread Lance had felt until they’d finally trapped Sendak behind the— 

He blinks his eyes open.

The green mouse blinks at him sleepily, a few inches away from his nose.

Lance just keeps blinking.

And tries to hold onto that last thought, that thought about Sendak, about trapping him— Tries to hold and pull the thread on that _memory_ — 

It’s gone.

He sighs, and closes his eyes again, now drifting off to the sounds of the mice and Keith’s deep breathing that turns into really soft snoring.

He smiles into his pillow and sleeps.

 

“Hey, Lance… About Keith...” Hunk starts, rubbing the back of his neck, the next morning. Or what Lance assumes is the next morning, by how rested Hunk had looked walking in with two bowls of steaming— green goo? 

(Lance had tried to eat half of his, but that had been all his stomach had been able to put up with before he started getting sweaty and nauseous and had to put it down.) 

“Yeah?” He encourages when he sees Hunk fall silent while a doubtful expression takes over his features.

Hunk looks at him, then, searching for something on his face.

Lance knows he looks besotted, probably, and just— extremely, ridiculously happy. He can’t help it. He is a demonstrative guy, it’s in his nature. He loves love and the idea of being in love and having that returned in kind and the possibility of having that for himself, with someone like Keith, who seems like he can challenge him and take care of him, and like he’d welcome Lance doing all that in return, and— he’s just a mushy dude. 

Hunk sighs then, and shoots him a lopsided smile.

“Nothing,” he says finally. Before Lance can pursue the subject any further, he adds, “do you want to hear about this time we helped space mermaids save their planet?”

And, well… Lance’s childhood dream was always to become a mermaid, so he can’t really be blamed for dropping the subject, right?

 

The next time he wakes up, the only one there is Pidge. 

She’s hunched in on herself, still tinkering with the same gadget that Lance is sure works perfectly already. 

He can’t recall anything about her, but as he looks at her figure, slumped and smaller than anyone else he’s seen in the ship so far, there’s something that just— aches in response. He feels something that’s not new, something that feels conditioned and nurtured. 

“Hey,” he murmurs, because talking louder than that feels like a transgression, kinda, like he’d be interrupting.

“Hey,” Pidge says back, quiet.

Lance blinks at her, looks at the shine in her eyes, at the way her hands are slower than he’s seen them be since he first woke up.

“We’re gonna find him,” he blurts out, and immediately feels like an asshole.

Pidge blinks up at him. After a couple of seconds the corner of her lips lifts in a tiny ghost of a smile before she goes back to her task.

Lance stares at the ceiling, trying to remember.

There are— bits and pieces. Bits and pieces that he can’t quite reach, like when you have a word at the tip of your tongue but can’t actually tell what word it is, and it drives you insane until you suddenly remember it a week later when you’re letting your little siblings beat you at Mario Kart.

He can feel them _there,_ but he can’t quite recall them, and trying to do that for more than a few minutes leaves him heaving over the bucket he thankfully hasn’t used since that one time.

“Once when he was preparing for exams he pulled a four day all-nighter, through sheer force of will, energy drinks, and coffee, and then when I came back home after his last exam I found him literally lying face down on the porch, sleeping like an ugly drooling baby. Our neighbour saw me trying to drag him inside and threatened to call the police,” Pidge tells him out of nowhere.

Lance tries to picture it, tries to picture Pidge with her longer hair and a dress like the one she’d been wearing in that memory from the mindmeld, trying to drag her brother inside and just bursts into laughter.

 

He only realizes Pidge never told him about any of that —the dress, the mindmelding, her hair— when he’s sinking into a sedative-induced sleep.

 

On what he guesses —from the ticker Hunk has helped him learn to read— is the evening of the third day, Hunk and Pidge have to leave on a mission. Hunk looks torn up about it, holding his hand and pouting a little, and Lance is so grateful for the fact that he’s still in his life. 

Allura rolls her eyes at him fondly as she keeps on checking on Lance’s vitals, making approving noises here and there, and Pidge just tries to pull him away.

She seems excited about the mission, and as soon as Hunk looks down at her, it seems to catch on, because he’s smiling bright and wide— and in that moment he looks just the way he looked like when he was a kid and got to do something he thought was the ultimate cool.

He lets himself be dragged away by Pidge, and Allura follows soon enough.

Keith stays. 

Lance hadn’t seen him in a while, and had tried to not feel dejected about it, and instead think that he was probably catching sleep, working on those tiny bags under his eyes. 

He clearly wasn’t though. The shadows are still there, more visible than they were before. 

“Hi,” he says, waving at the guy, who’s been standing awkwardly next to his chair since he walked in with everyone else.

Keith gives him a smile that’s nothing short of shy, says _hi_ back as he leans on the chair.

“You could just sit down, you know?” He teases with a smirk.

Keith rolls his eyes and plops down, giving him a look that’s a complete 180°, all raised eyebrows and _this good for you?_

You _are good for me_ , he thinks, ridiculous and full for no reason other than the way he feels so alive when Keith does— what he does, but just rolls his eyes.

“You were on a mission when I woke up, right? What were you doing?” He asks after the silence has stretched for a couple of minutes.

Keith scratches one of his cheeks.

“I was… actually I was exchanging your cow for information.”

“... I have a cow. In _space_.”

“You _had_ a cow,” Keith corrects.

“You got rid of my cow,” he accuses.

“You didn’t even know you had one a minute ago! And you’d given us permission, before. I left before you got stung.”

“Makes sense,” Lance says. “I wouldn’t want to leave _your_ side if something like this had happened to you.”

Keith chokes. Lance thumps him on the back, as firmly as he can without fearing he might hurt him— though he probably can’t, anyway, the sedatives (and what’s left of the poison, underneath that, less and weaker by the second, but still there) make him a little sluggish and weak.

“Are you okay there, buddy?”

Keith nods, but he looks decidedly anything but.

 _Maybe what we have is newer than I assumed_ , Lance thinks.

“Are you hungry?” Keith asks all of a sudden, standing up.

“Not really?” Lance replies.

“You should still eat,” Keith tells him, and starts walking towards the door. “I’ll bring you something. Hunk cooked lunch today.”

“Okay,” he says, mostly to himself.

 

The food Keith brings looks like pasta had a kid with some sort of weird vegetable and then they decided to adopt several lumps of something that looks a little like meat when he tilts his head to one side and squints.

He doesn’t hesitate on taking a mouthful, though, even with his stomach giving weak protests. It smells delicious, and Hunk hasn’t cooked anything less than amazing since he was twelve. 

“This reminds me of what he prepared for us when we were on Arus,” he says, unthinking, as he eats another spoonful.

“ _What_?” Keith asks, looking at him with wide eyes, spoon halfway to his mouth.

“It reminds me of Arus,” he repeats, and then he stops and frowns. “Huh,” he smiles. “I guess it’s coming back, a little.”

Keith’s spoon clatter as it falls into his bowl and Keith kind of flips it upside down in his haste to grab for Lance’s hand.

“That’s— that’s great, right?”

Lance laughs, squeezes Keith’s hand, and nods.

He can’t wait until he remembers every single thing about him, about them.

 

Keith stays the whole night with him, and Lance doesn’t even try to tell him to go get some sleep.

They play a couple of rounds of Uno with the cards Pidge left behind for them, and when they get bored of that Lance suggests they play 20 Questions, but Keith is epically bad at it, and he proposes a game he used to play as kid with one of the other kids he lived with in a foster home: he asks Lance a question and Lance has to answer with another and then Keith has to answer _that_ question and so on and so on until someone screws up and uses a regular sentence.

They end up going from ‘what’s up?’ to ‘why would I want to elope with your stolen cow that _wasn’t stolen_?’ before Lance can’t contain his snickers and gets disqualified for it.

After that they just stay quiet for a while, enjoying each other’s presence without the need for anything else.

Lance breaks the silence when something dawns on him.

“You all mentioned Shiro was one of us, right?” He asks. 

Keith nods, tentatively.

“I haven’t seen him yet since I woke up. Does he— do we not get along?”

It’s probably not the most tactful thing to say to his boyfriend who just found out a day or so ago that he used to have a crush on the guy, but it sits badly with him, the idea that his childhood crush and hero might not really like him all that much.

“No?” Keith asks, sounding lost. “He hasn’t been here because he actually isn’t here. At all. He’s on a retrieval mission, accompanying a guy called Slav.”

Lance _guffaws_. 

“That I’d pay to see,” he gets out between bouts of giggles, catching a stray tear with a finger, “that guy drives Shiro up the wall.”

“He does,” Keith agrees, and for a second he sounds too happy to just be agreeing to that statement— and then Lance realizes just what he said.

They both smile at each other.

 

The next day Pidge returns alone.

His throat closes up and he feels the room closing in on him until Pidge rolls her eyes at him, takes what she’s claimed as her spot at the foot of his bed and simply says, “Shay.”

“Oh,” he says then, letting all the air in his lungs go in one huge, relieved breath. “I didn’t know you were going to the Balmera.”

Pidge gapes at him.

“It’s been coming back in bits and pieces,” he tells her as he hands her the Uno deck. “Definitely not linear, and not a lot at a time, but it’s coming back.”

Pidge shuffles the cards with renewed enthusiasm.

“Good, I’m not gonna feel bad about making you eat all my cards, then.”

“That would imply that you felt bad about that before,” he drawls as Pidge deals him his hand.

 

Pidge absolutely wipes the floor with him, shows him no mercy, and probably cheats too. 

(“I didn’t cheat, you’re just a sore loser.”

“Oh, yeah? Roll up your sleeves.”

“It’s chilly here.”

“Uh huh, sure.”)

Then she goes and gets them dinner— green goo, without Hunk there. It’s kinda grown on him.

He can stomach almost his entire bowl, and feels like a champ for it.

Pidge eats hers and what’s left of Lance’s, and then yawns.

“Early day?”

She snorts.

“Early day? More like I haven’t slept a wink since we left the other day.”

“That’s… definitely not healthy.”

“You know what’s unhealthy? Giant fucking biorobotic assholes trying to kill us. That’s unhealthy.”

Lance nods.

“True.”

Pidge nods along, and raises a hand like _see?_

The general effect is ruined when a bunch of cards fall from her sleeve.

 

The fifth day he’s woken up by pain.

Blinding, searing pain, piercing through his brain.

He twists and turns and feels a pinprick of pain somewhere he just doesn’t want to— can’t contemplate right then, and nearly feels like tearing all his hair out.

Once the pain is gone all that’s left is his tears and his gasping breaths, nausea, black spots in his vision— 

—and clarity.

He passes out.

 

Hunk is the first thing he sees upon regaining consciousness, still in his suit, looking a couple of seconds away from bursting into tears.

“Oh, thank you, Jesus,” he breathes out when he sees Lance is awake. “You scared the crap out of Allura, when she came to check on you, there was blo—”

“When we got into the Garrison, I swore I would become Shiro’s protegé. The first simulator we did together we both threw up. When Pidge was assigned into our team we threw her a welcome party. Two months ago you told me you were in love with Shay.”

“Oh. My. God.”

“Yeah,” Lance agrees. “It all came back together— kinda like Miley’s wrecking ball.”

“Don’t,” says Hunk, “don’t ruin this beautiful moment.”

“Sorry,” he chuckles, and lets Hunk fuss over him for a while before he calls Coran and Allura over, who are ecstatic to see him recovered (and record the new information), and run a battery of tests on him, some of them extremely invasive.

“That’s not at all how I imagined Allura’s hands on my body would feel like,” he tells Hunk when Allura and Coran are finally satisfied that he’s fine and dandy.

“Uh huh, Romeo,” Hunk says back, rolling his eyes. “Because that’s exactly whose hands you’ve been picturing on you.”

Lance takes a huge breath. 

Keith.

 _Keith_.

Oh, _fuck_ , Keith.

“Uh, Lance? Buddy? You’re uh, you’re kinda freaking me out here. Should I be calling some—”

Lance turns to look at him, then, and Hunk falls silent immediately at what he sees in his face.

“Keith,” he says, as though that name alone explains everything. And it should with Hunk, who’s known him forever. Hunk, his best friend since elementary school. Hunk, who chickened out of telling him the truth at the last moment.

“Oh, that,” Hunk says, and where Lance expected him to look contrite, but he doesn’t. He looks conflicted, yes, but he also looks firm; he looks like he used to look when they fought back when they were kids, like it made him feel awful and he would prefer to be doing literally anything else in the world (including cleaning Mrs. Abrigo’s cat’s litter box for five dollars), but like he believes he’s doing the right thing.

It’s— It’s hard to be mad at his best friend when his best friend’s looking like that.

Lance kinda deflates.

“I spent all that time just— just flirting with him and being all over him and making all these assumptions and. I don’t know. Moving here permanently is starting to look like a great idea. You’ll have to find yourself a new Voltron paladin, you’re out one leg.”

Hunk doesn’t say anything.

“Why didn’t— why didn’t you tell me? Pidge maybe— I don’t know, maybe she thought it was normal levels of flirting for me, or something. But you? You know me better than anyone. You probably know me better than my mom does. Why didn’t you tell me?” 

“I don’t know,” Hunk sighs. He sits on Keith’s chair.

 _Not Keith’s chair_ , he tells himself, stern, his chair. The chair by his sick bed.

“Just—” Hunk starts, and then he points at him, “you didn’t have to look at your radiant face when he was there, Lance. You didn’t have to see you finally letting yourself have something you’ve been depriving yourself of for no good reason. You were so _happy_ , and he was happy too! And— I don’t know, I think we’re doing a lot of risky stuff for the sake of the universe every day of our lives and— and we deserve not to deny ourselves the things that make us happy. We deserve to embrace those things. _You_ deserve to embrace those things.”

He can’t stay mad at Hunk after that, even if he doesn’t completely agree with him, even though he still feels mortification crawling up his spine when he thinks about Keith. 

“C’mere,” he says, soft and fond, and then he’s being gently crushed by Hunk’s arms, face buried in his chest.

And that too is just like it was when they were kids.

 

Keith comes by a couple of hours later.

Lance pretends to be sleep, turned away from him.

He knows it’s immature and it doesn’t solve anything, but he has probably earned the right to be childish right now. 

Keith doesn’t think the same, apparently.

“I can tell you’re not really sleeping,” he tells him after ten minutes.

Lance bites his lips against a _well, that’s a little creepy_.

“You snore. And you talk. And you’re never this quiet.”

Lance tries to keep his breathing under control.

Keith touches his shoulder.

Lance doesn’t jump out of his skin out of sheer stubbornness, but it’s a damn near thing.

Keith keeps his hand where it is for a couple of minutes, and Lance’s heart gets out of control.

“I— I get it if you don’t wanna talk to me, I guess,” Keith says, finally, after a couple of minutes of obstinate unresponsiveness from Lance, “I just wanted you to know that I’m happy you’re finally okay. I’ll, uh, I’ll leave you alone now.”

 

And he keeps to his word.

Lance stays in the infirmary ward for another week, ‘under observation’, and he doesn’t show his face once.

Pidge and Hunk come every day and tell him about the mission he missed and what happened after he got stung by the Ax’etia, and show him pictures of Kaltenecker in his new home. 

They also pretend they don’t catch him staring at the door with a frown more often than not, because they’re his friends.

 

When he finally gets the okay to return to his own room he makes plans to spend the evening alone, chilling, him and himself. He plans to shave and then do a whole face treatment, and then curl up in bed with a couple of Altean movies queued up in his Altean equivalent of an iPad.

It’s not that it bothered him to have everyone caring for him, or that he disliked it. But sometimes a person needs to— not be in the company of other people.

Especially when they’re feeling kinda crummy for no reason.

Lamentably, whoever knocks on the door as he’s changing into his pajamas, seems to think differently.

He rolls his eyes and puts on the top as whoever’s on the other side knocks again.

“Coming,” he says, and then, as he reaches for the door, “Princess, I already told you I _will_ go to you or Coran if I get a rash or a bout of nausea or anything, okay?”

It’s Keith.

He freezes there, with the door half open.

Keith takes the chance to basically snake his way in. 

“Excuse me?” He asks then, baffled. “Who gave you permission?”

“I thought I could leave things as they are but I can’t,” Keith tells him, not an answer at all.

He’s barely a couple of inches away from him and Lance can’t— he can’t.

He closes the door and makes his way to the other end of the room, where the window is. 

Keith watches him walk away and sighs, sitting down on Lance’s bed, as though he owns it and the whole place.

“I thought I could just let this go and I can’t.” Keith tells him. “I don’t want us to— I don’t want us to not even be friends, Lance. That’s not what I want.”

Lance just looks at him, and there’s something frantic in him, in the set of his face, and the way he’s holding his hands, and kinda bouncing his knee. It’s more than Lance can contemplate at the moment, when he’s— a lot of things. Just, a lot of things.

“Do you— do you wish I hadn’t gotten my memories back?” He asks, not knowing who he’s looking to hurt more with the question, him or Keith.

Keith flinches, and then glares at him.

“What? No. You were—” He stops and Lance can see him wracking his brain for words, _good_ words. “You were half of you. And I was happy that you were okay, and that you— that you liked me— but I… I missed you. Like everyone else. You know that.”

Lance sighs, and turns around to lean his forehead on the window pane, eyes closed.

“I do, sorry, I’m just—”

“Mad,” Keith completes.

“Maybe? ...Yeah, a little.”

“I’m sorry,” Keith tells him, honest. No excuses, no nothing.

Lance hums.

“Out of all the times you choose to apologize for something, you go for the one time you probably have nothing to apologize for.” Lance says, amused despite himself.

“You’re angry. That’s enough for me to apologize,” Keith says, and Lance doesn’t have to see him to know he’s shrugging. everything is that easy with him.

 _Not really_ , he reminds himself, _not at all_. 

“I was also angry when—”

“You’re _actually_ angry. For something that I know about. That’s enough for me to apologize,” Keith amends.

Lance chuckles.

“I’m not mad at you,” he confesses. “I’m— I don’t know, I’m mad at myself? For just going ahead and seeing a guy like you being nice to me out of friendship and stuff and... and of course I just went ahead and thought _oh yeah, he must be my boyfriend_ instead of _here’s a cool guy who’s my team mate and doesn’t want me dead_.”

“What’s— what’s wrong with that?” Keith asks then, in a quiet mumble, barely audible in Lance’s quarters.

“There’s— there’s nothing wrong with that? It’s just embarrassing. To think that I— said all those things and did all those things to you.”

“You used to hit on Allura all the time,” Keith argues then, for some reason.

Lance snorts.

“Oh yeah, and those were not my finest moments. And— ” He sighs, opens his eyes. He sees stars. Stars upon stars. “She was safe. I knew deep down that it wasn’t ever gonna happen.”

Keith makes a strange sound then, and Lance almost wants to turn around and look at him.

“I probably made you, like, really uncomfortable,” he says, sighing. “I should be the one apologizing to you.”

“I’m not— I’m not safe?”

He _does_ turn around then, eyebrows meeting over the bridge of his nose.

“What?”

Keith shoots him an intense look then, stands up from his place on Lance’s bed and walks a couple of steps toward him.

“I’m not safe like Allura was? What does— does that mean that—?” 

Lance swallows.

“I don’t know what you’re—”

“We’re both too smart for that,” Keith tells him. “Just— what does it mean, Lance?”

Lance feels a surge of annoyance and leans back on the window pane, crossing his arms, his mouth twisted in an ugly sneer.

“What do you think it means, genius? I flirted with you like there was no tomorrow, I was convinced you were my boyfriend. Not even a guy I had a crush on, my _boyfriend_. You do the math.”

“I can be,” Keith blurts out.

“What?”

“I can be your boyfriend. I… I want to. I really, really want to. If you want to. You do, right?”

Lance gapes.

“I— Lance, you can’t— you can’t just tell me you couldn’t see it. Everyone else did. Everyone else gave me these looks when we weren’t with you in the ward, like I was some— some poor thing.”

Lance swallows.

“I—”

“It wasn’t the attention, and it wasn’t— I don’t know what else you could use to justify it but it wasn’t any of that, it was _you_. You, just the way it’s been since we held hands for the first time all those years ago. It was you, offering me a facsimile of what I wanted—”

“Facsimile? Fancy.”

“There really isn’t a lot to do in the castleship,” Keith says, shrugging, and then adds, “so yeah. I could be. I could be your boyfriend instead of that cool team mate who doesn’t want you dead. I don’t— I have no idea how to do this, how to do us, but I don’t care about screwing things up a little along the way— if it’s with you.”

Lance tells himself he’s not gonna cry.

For about five seconds.

Keith looks so distressed at that that Lance can’t help but laugh, tears still sliding down his cheeks. 

“You know,” he kinda breathes out when he’s finally calmed down, “there’s something I’ve wanted to do for about a week— no, for longer. Definitely for longer.”

“What’s that?” Keith asks, a smile as big as Lance has ever seen in his face— he looks like a flower in bloom, and like the sun coming up in the morning, and all that stuff you find in poetry. 

“I really want to kiss you,” he admits. “I really, really want to.”

“Does that—”

He rolls his eyes, but still beckons Keith towards him with the wiggle of a finger.

“Yes, it means that I want to kiss my boyfriend.”

“Okay, good,” Keith says, and grabs Lance’s finger when he’s close enough to, a point of contact just for the sake of it. “I really want to kiss my boyfriend too.”

Lance grins into the kiss as his hand goes towards Keith’s jaw and Keith’s lands on the back of his head, cradling it. The kiss is a conversation, a lazy exchange of pleasantries, a comfortable chat under the sun. It’s lips and tongues and wet heat. 

As they part, he see Keith lick his lips, a look so blissed out on him that it sets his gut on fire.

 _We deserve not to deny ourselves the things that make us happy. We deserve to embrace those things._ You _deserve to embrace those things._

He snorts. 

_Hunk is kinda always right_ , he thinks, and decides that the last thing he’ll ever do is tell him that, because he’d just never hear the end of it.

And then he follows Hunk’s advice, and kisses his boyfriend again.

**Author's Note:**

> [Come hang out with me on tumblr!](http://memekon.tumblr.com)


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